Rerouting Colonial Botany in Jamaica Kincaid's Among Flowers: a Walk in the Himalaya

'Gardenworthy': Rerouting colonial botany in Jamaica Kincaid's Among Flowers: A Walk In the Himalaya fill Didur Plants are as diverse as people. Some are polite, attractive guests you invite into your domain; others are nosypests who creep in uninvited and take root. (Chicago Botanical Garden website) Vermont, all by itselfshould be Eden andgardenworthy enough. But apparently, I do notfind it so. I seem to believe that I will find my idyll more a true ideal, only ifI canpopulate it with plantsfrom another side ofthe world. any plants considered prized additions to gardens over the last two centuries are embedded M in a set of material and textual practices linked to the history of colonialism and plant hunting in South Asia. What connects this history to contemporary gardening culture is a shared interest in domesticating foreign plants while still retaining an aspect of their exotic origins. This essay will investigate different textual practices used by plant hunters in South Asia to represent their encounters with the strange and unfamiliar, and consider how this has influenced the imag ined and actual domestication of exotic plants in European and NorthAmerican gardens. The OED defines an exotic, with reference to plants, as "introduced from abroad, not indigenous" but also "having the attraction of the strange or foreign, glamorous." My reading of Jamaica Kincaid's AmongFlowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (~oo5) [hereafterAmongFlowers] attempts to account for the tension between conceptions of the foreign and the domestic that informthe desirability ofcollect ingso-called exotic plants, and to considerwhat metaphorical implications this tension might have for reading Kincaid's own diasporic subject position in her travel narrative about plant-hunting in Nepal. I compare and contrast Kincaid's arguably counter-colonial narrative with early plant hunting memoirs set in and around the Himalayan region, including Joseph Dalton Hooker's The Himalayan Journals (1854), Frank Kingdon Ward's The Riddle of the Tzangpo Gorges (19~4) and, more recently, Roy Lancaster's Plant Hunting in Nepal (1981). Specifically, I consider how these different plant hunters narrate their encounter with the Himalayan landscape and examine how they frame their perception of botanical specimens like the 'high alpine' Rheum nobile (noble rhubarb). This essay is part ofa larger project that reflects onthe role plant-hunting memoirs have played in the globalization of alpine plants and practices associated with rock gardening culture from the nineteenth century onward.' While plant-hunting literature and activities appear to be largely a colonial project geared toward advancing a scientific agenda and economic botany, as well as domesticating certain types ofplants for European gardens, I demonstrate that narratives about these journeys are also fraught with anxieties concerning colonial authority. Reading these earlier plant-hunting texts in relation to Kincaid's account of her Nepal trip can provide the urban gardener with a worldly frame for understanding contemporary horticultural practices, pointing to their implication in colonial history, and disrupting popular attitudes toward gardening as a leisure activity pursued outside the bounds of cultural politics. Jamaica Kincaid's Among Flowers describes a three-week seed hunting expedition in Nepal during the fall of ~OO~. Simultaneously invoking and subverting the genre of colonial travel writing and plant-hunting practices, this book chronicles the experiences of Kincaid and her companions as they set out to gather the seeds of as many"gardenworthy" (Kincaid ~ooS, uS) plants as they can find during their trip. The term gardenworthy is used by Kincaid to refer to the kind of plants that can be easily cultivated in the cooler temperatures associated with gardens in Europe and North America. As Kincaid's narrative makes visible, however, the definition of what counts as garden worthy is quite slippery, and involves a complex cultural negotiation not necessarily dependent on climatic conditions. The use of the term is quite common in popular gardening books, magazines, and websites. Gardenworthy is used to describe the hardiness as well as the appropriateness of growing certain plants in particular climatic zones. When Kincaid first mentions this concept inAmongFlowers, she describes how the botanists she travels with debate the best route for the trip, and she emphasizes that" [e]very square foot of terrain must be carefully pored over so that not a single garden-worthy plant is missed, the poor collector not knowing ifhe will ever be able to come this way again" (3~). Here, "garden-worthy" appears with a hyphen that is subsequently dropped, something Kincaid suggests has to do with her growing sense of connection to the plantsmen's vocabulary. "Gardenworthy" Kincaid explains, has a sweeping authority, a confidence in judgement that they, the plantsmen have. It's most likely that I, in trying to copy them, trying to enter the club so to speak, used it in that way. But my own way of saying it, still trying to borrow their confidence and authority would have used the word with a hyphen. The [initial use of the] hyphen would have been me trying to prop up my slender association with the whole enterprise (~oo7, email to the author). The initial instability of Kincaid's use of"garden(-)worthy" in the story of her plant-huntingtrip in Nepal can be read as an expression of her liminal status in relation to the activity. Indeed, she has used this word previously with a hyphen in her account of a seed hunting trip in China anthologized in her collection, My Garden (Book): [hereafter My Garden]. A much less physically challenging undertakingthanthe Nepal trip, Kincaid explains thatshe and hertravellingcompanions were bussed between plant-hunting locations over terrain that held very little interest for the group. She com mentshow, 174 nlDUR ______J For a very long time (or so it seemed to the botanists and to me, too-I was beginning to see things only from their point ofview L.. Dwe saw nothing of interest L.. ] scrub and scrub and scrub (scrub as an entity holding nothing that the botanists thought of as garden-worthy, and that whole idea, .garden-worthy' will eventually have its own enemies, its own friends and passionate supporters) (1999, 198). Learning to see things from the perspective of the botanists and familiarizing herself with the "friends" and"enemies" of what counts as garden(-)worthy are things that Kincaid takes up with deeper interest inAmong Flowers. In Nepal she describes herself as being initiated into "the club" offamous plant hunters and horticulturists (such as Lancaster, Hooker and Ward) who have written about botanical explorations in the same region she visits and with whose accounts she is well versed. I would like to suggest, however, that Kincaid's entry into this world involves inhabiting the role of the explorer in a manner that seeks to appropriate and change, and not simply debunk, the terms for how the activity of plant-hunting is understood. Of course, Kincaid's interest in gardening culture's colonial underpinnings has been a defin ing quality of her creative writing throughout her career. Her first novel, Annie]ohn, for example, uses references to indigenous and foreign plants and trees (guava, Psidium guajava, and bread fruit, Artocarpus altilis, respectively) as a way of indirectly highlighting the impact of slavery and colonial practices onAntigua's cultural and economic history. Born in colonial Antigua in 1949, a descendant of slaves, Kincaid moved to the US in 1966, where she began her career as a staffwriter for The New Yorker. My Garden anthologizes Kincaid's personal essays about the history ofcolonialism and botanical exploration, her own growing interest in gardening culture, and places her attrac tion to these topics at the forefront of her current work as a writer. As some critics have noted, however, it is often an unsettling experience to read Kincaid's reflections on her activities and interests as a gardener. As Jeanne C. Ewert observes, "On first reading L.. ] My Garden (Book): seems to present a fairly straight forward, and often engaged indictment of the colonial practices of appropriating, renaming, and relocating plants from their native countries to other parts of the world." Ewert and others have noted, however, "a closer look at Kincaid's garden L.. ] reveals the degree to which Kincaid herself engages in the very practices she criticizes" ('2,006, 113). While I agree that it is possible to identify parallels between Kincaid's and the colonial plant hunters' passion for gardening and exotic plant acquisitions, it is also impossible to ignore the "layered self consciousness" (Nixon '2,010, lO) of Kincaid's narrative, something that Rob Nixon regards as a defining quality of travel writing by Black postcolonial writers. Like the post-apartheid game park experience in South Africa that Nixon reflects on in his essay, "Stranger in the Eco-village," the contemporary Himalayan plant-hunting expedition could be described as "a spaced marked as non-coeval with the world around it and whose implication in modernity is suppressed" (8). Kincaid's entry into this "anachronistic space," (8) and her decision to narrate its pleasures and challenges while also foregrounding how her racial difference, "disrupts the smooth optics of tourism" (9) that characterize trekking and mountaineering culture in Nepal, setting her apart from the other plant hunters as someone who not only looks but is also looked at. One among many examples of this type of disruption inAmong Flowers includes Kincaid's story of a Nepalese woman who was fascinated by her "braided-into-cornrow hair" (Kincaid '2,005, 46). "She asked," recalls Kincaid, "if I could make her own hair look like mine. I did not know how to tell her that my hairdo L.. ] was made possible by weaving into my own hair the real hair of a woman from a part of the world that was quite like her own" (46).

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